This paper provides a critique of the use of growth regressions to derive policy implications. The author challenges the conventional interpretation of empirical results, arguing that current econometric practice has yielded a body of evidence that is not policy relevant. Extending his own...

This paper develops some general conditions under which complementarities between individual agents imply that assortative matching is efficient. Our analysis has four main findings. First, when agents are organized into equal-sized groups, just as in Becker (1973), the presence of within-group...

This paper critically examines the way in which empirical evidence is developed in support of a role for social capital in socioeconomic outcomes. Three leading studies of social capital are reviewed and in each case argued to suffer from various identification problems. A general set of...

This paper contributes to the policy evaluation literature by developing new strategies to study alternative policy rules. We compare optimal rules to simple rules within canonical monetary policy models. In our context, an optimal rule represents the solution to an intertemporal optimization...

This paper considers the observational implications of social influences on adoption decisions for an environment of perfect foresight adopters. We argue that social influences can produce two observable effects: 1) discontinuities in unconditional adoption curves and 2) pattern reversals in...

Although the Russian economy performed poorly in the first seven years following the collapse of the USSR, the reforms of the 1990s laid the foundation for strong growth in 1998–2008. The early 2000s also saw successful reforms, such as the flat income tax and streamlined regulations....

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are a major source of individual patient level data (IPD) on the clinical outcomes, costs and other measures of health consequences associated with alternative healthcare interventions. These data are typically used to establish the ‘value for...

There is disagreement about whether large and complex financial institutions should be allowed to use US bankruptcy law to reorganise when they get into financial difficulty. We look at the events surrounding the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing for lessons as to whether bankruptcy law could be...